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Apple, meet WYSIWYG; it’s the way Macs used to work

The Mac survived because it was the first thorough attempt in a low-cost computer to accomplish WYSIWYG. Sales soared when the Desktop Publishing Revolution came, and designers could see pages on their displays which were very close in appearance to those that would emerge from the printers. Gone was that horrendous experience when you discovered that page proofs of your twenty-page brochure were actually twenty-two pages redesigned by a gremlin.

Without WYSIWYG, macOS would be long dead, and it’s still at the core of every user’s assumptions about what they see on screen. We’ve survived HTML font substitution and other attempts to shatter the illusion, but when it comes down to it, we expect high fidelity.

Dark Mode has been a challenge to this, and it’s a challenge which Apple still hasn’t addressed properly. Those of us who work fairly constantly in Dark Mode have come to understand that white is black and the reverse when working with text, but we continue to rely on colour. Any image editor which inverted its colours or their lightness values just because you switched from one Mode to the other would be laughed out of court. Yet that’s pretty well what Apple’s standard rich text editor does, and without your even having to change Mode.

To experience this, switch to Dark Mode, open TextEdit in Mojave 10.14.6, and enable its dark window background (View menu, Use Dark Background for Windows ticked). Find some nice solid characters in the Emoji & Symbols pane, and make a rectangle of them in your document. Select them all, and change their colour to a deep purple, in the row next to the top of the colour table.

Then untick that menu command to use a regular white window background. What happens to the colours in your document?

Yes, they change from dark purple to light lilac. And so they remain in Light Mode, where the option for a dark window background is removed altogether from TextEdit’s menu.

A little experimentation demonstrates that, rather than TextEdit using the colour you selected, it chose the light lilac instead, but just to fool you, when a dark background is enabled, it changed the display colour to what you thought you were using. Try printing to PDF, for instance, or copy and paste into another app.

Compare any other rich text editor, such as Nisus Writer Pro or my own free DelightEd, and the colours you choose remain constant whatever the Mode.

Look inside the rich text code, and you’ll see that your original colour wasn’t dark purple as shown on the display, but light lilac instead. The prefatory colour and expanded colour tables set the dark purple as light lilac:{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;\red254\green204\blue255;}
{\*\expandedcolortbl;;\cssrgb\c100000\c84540\c100000;}
and that’s the colour all those characters were set in:\cf2 \uc0\u9751
and so on.

There are only two reasonable ways of displaying colour like this, irrespective of Mode or background window colour: faithful to the colour, or to expected human perception. TextEdit has neither intent. It simply inverts the lightness of each colour when the window background is switched between light and dark. That deliberately flouts WYSIWYG for no good reason.

TextEdit has behaved in this way since macOS 10.14.2 was released on 5 December 2018, more than six months ago. Someone in Apple clearly thinks that this is the way to go, and it’s fine and dandy. If that’s the case, please keep them away from macOS altogether, because they don’t understand what makes a Mac a Mac, or why we so willingly pay Apple for our systems. If we wanted apps to do confusing things like this behind our backs, then we’d all go off and use Windows.

6Comments

Bingo. I actually find the state of macOS devolving over time even as it adds more features. Tried and proven UI concepts are abandoned as its flexibility, elegance and discoverability are diminished. The worst part is how so many (new) Mac users don’t even get it. The OS is everything; it is the personal computer from a user’s perspective. So, as macOS devolves and other platforms improve, it makes the Mac platform less compelling. There used to be a huge distinction between the Mac and other platforms, though many people obviously did not get it. But those that did kept Apple afloat and had a burning passion for (nearly) all things Apple. I lost that years ago. Tim Apple killed it.

There have to be tradeoffs though. Using DelightEd in dark mode, if I choose a dark text color other than black, I literally cannot see what I am typing. In TextEdit, I can since it gets inverted; this is a tradeoff. The fact is, if you’re using Dark Mode to do word processing, you don’t value WYSIWYG very highly. You’re going to be printing on white paper, so Dark Mode is simply out of the question. I was going to upload a couple screenshots to prove my point, but the commenting feature doesn’t seem to allow it.

Thank you.
No there don’t have to be such grossly incorrect trade-offs. If you’re setting a document in near-white, does macOS invert the colour on a white background so that you can see it? Actually it’s very important to me to be able to see Rich Text rendered in faithful colour in both modes, because I use it in documentation. If TextEdit lies to me, then users may not see the same as it shows me. It becomes an unreliable tool, and useless.
I see that you want to blame me for not valuing WYSIWYG because I choose to use Dark Mode. I’m sorry, that simply isn’t true. Have you come across bimodal text? Have you used an image editor which defaults to using (at least local) Dark Mode? Does the latter alter the colours in your image when you change the background colour?
I can’t remember how many months or years it is since I last printed anything out from this Mac. I don’t write for print, but WYSIWYG is part of my basic agreement with macOS. If macOS doesn’t honour that, then it’s no better than Windows, is it?
Howard.